Student Work from Final Practicum - Graphics, Photography & Drawing & Painting

I was so very fortunate to teach many talented student artists at Dr. Charles Best Secondary during my final practicum. Exemplary student work follows below - and representing only some outstanding pieces, not all. Courses were Drawing & Painting 11/12, Graphics 11, and Photography 11. This work represents units on Drawing the Human Figure, Art Nouveau, Photographic Formalism, Photographic Still Life, Digital Mandalas, and Non-profit Posters. Zeb (piece to right) is well placed and bound for a creative career, primarily in photography. His gift for composition and staging translated well into his graphics work. Brad (below) will also be pursuing a career in the arts/communications. He has an extraordinary facility with meshing image and text. Daniel (right) is an extremely gifted graphic artist who is also planning this as a career. The Digital Mandala unit with the Graphics class was a great success and definitely a "keeper unit". The building blocks of their designs were using two different initials from any choice of font (with many choosing to design their own font). The initials were then replicated, changing size and placement to a quarter circle, then replicated again into the full circle. I wanted to work with both some basic principles of EPAD (colour theory, pattern, repetition, etc.) as well as working with text shapes as design elements rather than content. Students worked very quickly and produced excellent work across the board. They had the choice to hand draw the 1/4 circle designs and then scan into PhotoShop for adding colour and replicating to full circle. This process produced the best results by Maiko and Julia (directly below) and I think gave a valuable lesson about traditional drawing skills. They are exquisitely, skillfully intricate. I particularly like Maiko's (left) as she designed her fonts (M & A) to look like Japanese Samuri swords.

The following work represents a series of workshops on Drawing the Human Figure, which I took from recent course work at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. I was thrilled with the quality of line and gesture students achieved. They were fearless and unrestrained! The visual journal or altered text is sure to remain one of my favourite vehicles to teach through - a wonderful way to encourage experimentation and skills building in a personal and reflective way. Every Friday was portfolio day and without question, a favourite day for all. Every week there would be a mini lesson in things like collage technique, simple print-making, exploration of different drawing materials, and best of all, "found poetry". Found poetry is something I discovered through the work, The Humanent, by British artist, Tom Phillips. This is a wonderful way to teach writing skills in the art room and a particularly good way to introduce poetry to younger students. Discovering ideas for writing poetry can be an obstacle initially. Found poetry is one of the best pre-writing exercises there is. Words already there to be re-strung into one's own glittering lines. Students enjoyed this work a great deal and most found several poems in this 1-class lesson and we spent time the next class reading them aloud. A very interactive and animated exercise which I recommend highly - very community building and even relaxing. Most rewarding was that some students continued using this exercise in other work. The second unit with the Drawing and Painting class was a juicy unit on Art Nouveau and Art Deco with lots of art history and cross-curricular to social studies topics. We looked at a lot of examples and students copied some 12-20 different design motifs they liked into their own style sheet or portfolios. Then, used their motifs for designing - jewelry, masks, furniture, building facades. A very worthwhile unit with some gorgeous work done. One piece I regrettably didn't get a picture of was a set of gilded iron gates inset with coloured glass and botanical shapes. The artist is a magnificiently talented young woman named Gawon. She is also a poet and her journal is captivating. The gesture drawing above titled 'Magical' is also Gawon's work, as is this journal page. Many of the students in Photography 11 were completely new to composition and to SLR cameras, digital-savvy though many were. I stressed compositional techniques through formalism and insisted on thoughtful, full-frame considerations. Quality over quantity!